Enemies Within

by Don Pendleton

  In charge, of course, was the President of the United States, his guards stationed outside the double doors. Hal Brognola represented Justice, while Major General Ralph Colletti spoke for the US Army Special Operations Command. The fourth man present, Jason Dunn, was an assistant director of the Secret Service’s Investigations Division.

  The President, as those who knew him best might say, was “in a mood” and not shy of expressing it to his subordinates. “I want an explanation as to how this thing’s dragged on so long,” he told them. “And I want it now.”

  The general pulled rank, responding first. “Sir, we’ve been covering this mission from the hour it broke, and I can confidently say—”

  “What can you say?” the Man cut in. “So far, you’ve lost six agents from the CID and you’re no closer to resolving it than on day one.”

  “Sir, I believe it’s fair to say—”

  “Enough!” Swinging his high-backed swivel chair toward Brognola, the President demanded, “What’s the story now? I mean right now, this minute.”

  “As reported, we’ve determined to our satisfaction, sir, that their Islamic trappings and their so-called manifesto are a hoax. They’re after cash and should be moving on it soon, in Richmond, at or near the Federal Reserve Bank.”

  “When you say ‘soon’...?”

  “I mean within the hour, sir. I have two of my best men on the scene, prepared to intervene, with eyes on and assistance from a UAV up high.”

  “‘Eyes on,’” the President echoed. “That means you’ve got the Rangers spotted?”

  “Former Rangers, sir,” Colletti interjected.

  “Save it for the press release, will you?” the President replied acerbically. “Hal, tell us what you mean precisely.”

  “Striker and his pilot are on-site, sir, eyeballing potential targets. We’ve confirmed one former Ranger KIA. Another may be wounded, and we have no way of knowing whether he’ll be with the rest when they move on the Secret Service team.”

  “Regarding that...” The SS man chimed in. “I have to say we’re confident our team can see the shipment through without losing a single bill.”

  “I know you have to say it, Mr. Dunn, but if we knew that to be true, I could be golfing now instead of sitting underground with you three gentlemen.” He swiveled back toward Brognola once more, saying, “I want updates at fifteen-minute intervals, with no excuses. And the second something pops, I want this whole mess put to bed. Understand?”

  “Understood,” Brognola replied.

  He understood, all right. And if he blew this one, he would be history.

  East Byrd Street, Richmond, Virginia

  Captain Dillon Elsberry toggled his walkie-talkie, reaching out to the GM Canyon armored trucks his SUV was trailing through lunch-hour traffic on the last leg of their journey to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. “Three-quarters of a mile and counting down,” he said. “Whatever’s coming, it will happen soon, so everyone on red alert.”

  The voices of the two truck drivers came back to him, overlapping as they spoke. “Affirmative!”

  Elsberry knew the job’s security minutiae inside out. Four agents in each truck, counting the driver and a passenger up front, with the two in the back, locked down, watching the shrink-wrapped cash.

  Any attempt to stop one of the trucks would trigger automatic radio alerts, with flashing lights and sirens on each vehicle. The armor on each truck was hardened with chromium layers, including the walls, floor, ceiling and doors. Strop hinges held all doors in place, resisting access from outside, and each door had a gun port to prevent attackers coming close enough with acetylene torches. Air vents kept the passengers from suffocating, even if the Canyon’s air-conditioner shut down. All six tires were armored with U-shaped hard plastic liners; if one or more deflated, they could run for several miles on the shell’s structure alone, while steel ramming bumpers and front grille guards allow the driver to push aside crash cars obstructing their path.

  Elsberry’s SUV, by contrast—a Ford Explorer on a light-truck chassis—was a piece of cake to crack, nothing but four-wheel drive and its armed occupants to hold attackers at bay. It had no armor or “bulletproof” windows, no run-flat tires, or any other special gear beside its lights, siren and rolling arsenal in well-trained hands.

  Trained well enough, in theory, to do the job at hand and see it through.

  The captain couldn’t reach the chopper pacing his convoy at seven hundred feet, much less whoever might be running the Predator drone higher up, from a bunker somewhere in the desert wastes of the Southwest. He was the officer in charge, linked by his dashboard radio to Secret Service headquarters in Washington. But by the time they got the message, rallied reinforcements to him from a field office in Richmond or DC, the battle would be history.

  “Terrific,” Elsberry muttered.

  “How’s that, Captain?”

  “Nothing, Olmstead. Both eyes on the road.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  They had, say, half a mile now, and whatever was about to happen had to happen soon.

  * * *

  Half turning in his seat, Major Darby asked Colonel Knowlton, “How you holding up back there?”

  “Fit as a fiddle.”

  That was a load of crap. Nobody with a bullet wound beneath his ribs felt fit, but Darby’s question had been smoke, as well. He had no plans for Knowlton to survive the mission once he’d blown the pickup on Juanita Alvarado. At the outset, they had been together on the double-cross, tricking the Feds and their companions, but with Knowlton wounded now and half a failure in the bargain, Plan B automatically kicked in.

  Darby would use the other members of his team to load his share of loot into the Escalade, then leave them to prevent him being followed from the scene when he took off with—what?—two billion, maybe, or a little more.

  Palming his walkie-talkie, he reached out to Moseley first. “Position, Lieutenant, and final preparation.”

  Crackling, then the voice came back. “Two blocks ahead and slowing down. On track with nothing in the way.”

  “Sergeant, same Q and A.”

  “One block in advance and running parallel. Ready to go,” Menendez replied.

  “Affirmative, blockers. Stand by.”

  On Darby’s signal, Moseley and Menendez would close in, bail out and lay down interdicting fire on the lead armored truck. While that was going on, the remainder of Darby’s team would close in from behind the Secret Service chase car, lay it open with the Barkas RPG and cut the opposition’s numbers, before reloading and disabling the second truck in line. Caught in a crossfire, he assumed the first truck’s driver would attempt evasive action, but it wouldn’t matter when Darby’s third 105 mm tandem HEAT rocket drove home and demolished the GM Canyon.

  Along with half the cash, that was, but what the hell? Most of it wasn’t going anywhere, regardless. By the time his fellow soldiers recognized the score, they would be dead or scrambling for their lives in vain, and Darby would be making his end run to clear the scene.

  His odds against survival? Call it fifty-fifty, if his luck held. And for one cool billion, maybe half again that much, Darby would bet on those odds any day and twice on Sunday.

  “Get that Barkas loaded, Andy, will you?” Darby ordered from his bucket seat up front. “And don’t forget the safety, right?”

  “I hear you,” Knowlton said, and went to work.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Moseley timed his move as if the colonel actually meant him to survive and pull it off, instead of going down while Darby and whoever else he’d taken into confidence were raking off the cream and hightailing it out for parts unknown. Yeah, he’d figured out he was expendable. But he still had a fighting chance to grab some cash and avoid a bullet to the brain. He had the Honda CR-V revved up to nearly 80 miles per hour when he cut the steering w
heel hard right and slewed across two lanes of East Byrd Street, then brought it to a screeching halt and set the hand brake while he left its 2-liter Honda K engine engaged.

  Bailing, he kept the SUV between him and the approaching lead truck of the Secret Service caravan. The truck’s steel grille was built for ramming, but it didn’t shield the radiator from a penetrating shot, and that was Moseley’s big ace in the hole.

  Drawing the 4-inch Colt Python he’d concealed from other members of his Ranger team, Moseley lined up its precision-adjustable sights, cocked the revolver’s hammer to begin firing in single-action mode, squeezed its smooth trigger and braced for the recoil as a 10-gram Buffalo Bore Heavy slug hurtled toward impact.

  The round slipped past the GM’s grille, punched through its radiator and plowed on to crack its V6 engine block. Before that damage registered through dashboard lights, Moseley had triggered two more rounds, dead-on, and wisps of smoke squirmed out beneath the Canyon’s hood. The truck began to slow involuntarily, its lights flashing, a siren sounding off hysterically.

  Moseley bagged the Python, fishing out a pair of hand grenades.

  The first he lobbed under the truck was fragmentation, an apple-shaped M-67 with a four-second fuse, Composition B filling comprised of RDX and TNT, with a kill radius of sixteen feet and an injury radius out to fifty. Before that egg had time to detonate, his second pitch was on its way: an AN-M-8 smoke grenade.

  With any luck, the frag grenade might crack something beneath the armored truck, then smoke might bleed inside. If nothing else, a smoke cloud would envelop it and blind its occupants while Moseley hustled up and made his move.

  And after that...well, who could say what happened next?

  * * *

  Sergeant Ernesto Menendez saw Moseley make his move and reacted at once, swinging his Saturn Outlook SUV into a squealing left-hand swerve and bringing it to a rocking halt a few yards behind the lieutenant’s Honda CR-V. Before his boots hit the blacktop, Moseley was already banging at the nearest armored truck with a handgun Menendez didn’t recognize, some kind of Magnum revolver firing measured shots into the GM Canyon’s grille.

  So, call that deviation number one.

  Lugging his M-4 carbine and a satchel of grenades, Menendez saw the armored truck seize up and start to smoke from underneath its hood. Four pistol rounds, and by the time Menendez had his weapon’s barrel braced across the Honda’s hood, Moseley had pitched a frag grenade under the front end of the armored truck. He didn’t know what kind of damage would result from that explosion, but the smoke grenade that followed popped on cue and sent clouds of grayish fog rising around the GM Canyon.

  Feeling left out, Menendez pressed his right eye to the M-4’s advanced combat optical gunsight and triggered three full-automatic bursts into the Secret Service transport’s windshield. There was no question of shattering that glass—two inches thick and set at a forty-five-degree angle to aid in projectile deflection—but his carbine’s nine 5.56 mm NATO rounds still etched a zigzag misty pattern on the tinted pane, helping to obscure the view of its trapped driver and his shotgun rider while one of them jabbered on the Canyon’s two-way radio, the other seeking targets he could strike at from the gun port set in the passenger’s door.

  It was the extra break Moseley needed to rush forward, scurrying around the rear end of his Honda CR-V and scuttling in a crouch toward the armored transport’s driver’s side. They’d studied up on that in preparation for the strike, and knew that if you timed it properly, a gun port worked both ways. While passengers inside the transport could fire out at their attackers, raiders who confused those passengers and got the jump on them could also shove a weapon’s muzzle through one of the slots from outside and unload on anyone within the cab.

  Like Moseley was doing now, his M-4’s barrel jammed in through the driver’s door and emptied its 30-round box magazine in ten measured bursts, exhausted in two seconds flat of muzzle-blazing hell inside the GM Canyon’s cab. Menendez didn’t see the Secret Service agents die, per se, but when their blood spattered the inside of the transport’s windshield, he knew they were down and out for good.

  He jogged forward and knelt in curling smoke beside the passenger’s door. No way inside unless one of the corpses in the cab released its inner latch, but the position covered Menendez from the second transport—not that any of its gun ports faced directly forward as it came from the GM assembly line. His only worry now would be the SUV assigned to trail the armored trucks...and anybody else who might be eyeballing the action on East Byrd Street from whatever vantage point.

  Worries enough, damned right.

  And even now a squeal of tires announced the Secret Service chase car closing in.

  * * *

  “Shit fire!” Grimaldi blurted through the Bell’s headphones. “It’s going down!”

  “And so are we,” Bolan replied. “Where can you land?”

  “Most anywhere that’s flat,” Grimaldi said. “But I’d prefer not getting shot to hell and being left on foot.”

  “Your call,” Bolan agreed, “but make it close enough that we don’t miss the party.”

  “Roger that!”

  Bolan already had his Steyr AUG in hand, its folding foregrip lowered, as Grimaldi nosed the chopper forward in a diving spiral toward the street that had become a smoking battleground. It was a giddy roller-coaster feeling, squeezing Bolan’s stomach back against his spine, but he was still strapped into the copilot’s seat, legs braced and rigid with his boots flat on the cabin’s floorboard.

  As the Bell lost altitude, Grimaldi swung it in a circle, rotor blades whipping the smoggy downtown Richmond air. From where he sat, Bolan could see two vehicles swing in to block the lead truck’s progress, single occupants unloading from each SUV and pumping rounds into the transport’s grille and windshield. One of the attackers lobbed grenades—first high explosive then a canister of smoke—obscuring the scene before they closed to killing range.

  The second armored transport should have swung around its leader, but the normal traffic sliding past on either side cut off that option, even when its lights began to flash, its siren whooping. Ordinary drivers, taken by surprise, had no idea that they had crossed into a war zone—not, at least, until they heard gunshots, saw muzzle-flashes winking at them, and were shaken by grenade blasts rippling through asphalt beneath their tires. Some hit their brakes, stalling engines in their panic, while others veered sharply across lanes, piling into the traffic coming up behind them in a rush of blissful ignorance.

  Grimaldi found a strip of greenway on the highway’s shoulder, flat enough to land the Bell, although the city had its sprinklers on and Bolan felt the helicopter’s skids slip for a second on the wet grass, before they settled down beneath its stock five thousand pounds. Before the rotors slowed above him, Bolan slipped the buckles on his safety harness, grabbed the Steyr in his left hand and turned back for the MBT LAW launcher, just in case.

  He didn’t want to use it, but if it came to the worst-case scenario, neither did Bolan wish for a mad scramble back to the chopper while his targets made off with a ton of cash, untouchable.

  On Bolan’s left, as he ran down to street side, with Grimaldi catching up, the Secret Service chase car was approaching with its lights and siren putting on a show. Four shapes were visible inside, behind its tinted glass, and one of them was eyeing Bolan as he ran along the wet grass, sprinklers hissing as they drenched him from the chest downward.

  No matter.

  When he charged into the fires of hell, a little moisture couldn’t hurt.

  Chapter Twelve

  Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC

  Hal Brognola’s Lincoln Town Car was halfway between the White House and the Justice Building when he got the text from Bolan on his cell. Before he’d even had a chance to summarize his meeting in the Situation Room, it hit him like a fist striking his ste
rnum, pummeling his heart.

  Happening now. Out.

  Three words, nothing more, and the big Fed could think of no response. More to the point, sending an answer would be wasted time and energy with Striker on the job. Bolan knew what to do, how to react if it was going down, and anything Brognola typed into his phone would only take the warrior’s mind away from business, if he even bothered reading it.

  But what could the Justice man do, on his own, now that the battle had begun?

  He had already ruled out reinforcements, for the risk of Bolan and Grimaldi being caught up in a law-enforcement cross fire. Secret Service headquarters, reluctantly, had signed off on effectively abandoning its convoy in a show of faith for Brognola and his agents in place. If it went south, the burden would be his, and no force in the great American bureaucracy would stop a ton of shit from landing squarely on his shoulders, smothering the final years of his career.

  And yet... Brognola knew he couldn’t just head back to Justice and hole up in his office while the clash in Richmond ran its course. He wasn’t built that way, and while his long days in the field were history, he wouldn’t call them ancient history.

  He still remembered all the moves he’d learned at Quantico and those he’d picked up afterward, the tricks that kept him breathing while some of his fellow agents bit the dust. Pine Ridge in South Dakota. Cleveland, taking down a fugitive wanted for rape, armed robbery and kidnapping. El Centro, California, where a pissed-off walk-in shot two agents at their desks then turned the weapon on himself. And the Miami massacre, with two men dead, five others wounded, in a melee that made anything on movie screens look tame.